Selective Pixel Transmission for Navigating in Remote Virtual Environments

Abstract

This paper presents a technique to improve the performance of a walkthrough in remote virtual environments, where a scene is rendered jointly by the server and the client, in order to reduce the network requirements as much as possible. The client generates novel views by extrapolating a reference view based on the locally available geometric model, while the server transmits data necessary to prevent an accumulation of errors. Within this concept, we show that by transmitting only a selected subset of pixels, the quality of the extrapolated views can be improved while requiring less bandwidth. We focus on the selection process in which the visibility gaps between the reference view and novel view are detected, packed and transmitted compressed to the client.